Use code SUMMERPRACTICE for a 25% discount on all On Demand Courses through August 31.

When did you stop breathing?

With Vimalasara Mason-John recorded on June 4, 2017.

Found our teachings useful? Help us continue our work and support your teachers with a donation. Here’s how.

We could say that the Buddha was teaching us to breath again. It’s said that the prince Siddhartha was sitting under a Bodhi tree, practicing the anapanasati (the mindfulness of breathing) when he gained enlightenment and became awake, a Buddha. He was aware of the whole experience of breathing. Through breathing he trained the mind to be sensitive to the body, rapture, pleasure, the mind, mental processes, impermanence, dispassion, cessation, relinquishment. And while breathing he learned to release the mind from suffering. In this session we explore turning towards experience with breathing.

Listen to the audio version below, or click here to download the mp3.

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Nirmala Werner

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nirmala Werner – Week of 24 November, 2025

    We are delighted to have Nirmala Werner guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May these sessions support and enrich your practice. This week’s theme is: Embodying the Four (or Five) Elements: Meditation for Everyday Presence. Rooted in Buddhist wisdom, this practice invites us to connect with earth, water, fire, air, and space as living forces within and around us. By attuning to their ever-shifting qualities, we find grounding amidst change-an anchor of presence, steadiness, and clarity to meet the movements of daily life. Our Dharma Library thrives through collective generosity. Your donation helps sustain this offering for our entire community.

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Zohar Lavie – Week of 31 March, 2025

    We’re delighted that Zohar Lavie will be leading our Daily Meditation sessions this week. We hope they bring depth and joy to your practice.

    This week’s theme is: A Compassionate Response

    As sensitive beings, we are impacted by the conditions of our lives. Having a body, heart and mind means meeting painful and challenging circumstances, whether in our immediate environment or in the world. During this week we will explore possibilities of responding with and through compassion to whatever is arising in our lives. Attuning as we do so to further wellbeing for all beings.

    Our Dharma Library thrives through collective generosity. Your donation helps sustain this offering for our entire community.

    Read More

  • The Happiness of a Liberated Heart

    What is pleasure and what is happiness? Why is my pursuit of happiness not working? Is there any lasting happiness? Together we inquire into the nature of happiness. We reflect on different attempts in our lives to find happiness and what stops us from being contented. Inspired by the Buddha’s own quest for a genuine…

    Read More

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Ayala Gill – Week of 02 June, 2025

    We’re delighted to have Ayala Gill guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May these sessions support and deepen your practice.

    This week’s theme is: The Body is a Doorway to Love

    Through relating to the elements of the body, we cultivate a presence that is grounded, awake, open, relaxed and spacious.
    As the body becomes a more stable home for the heart and mind, everything settles and softens back to its natural state of aliveness and love.

    Our Dharma Library thrives through collective generosity. Your donation helps sustain this offering for our entire community.

    Read More

  • Christine Kupfer

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Christine Kupfer – Week of 30 June, 2025

    We’re grateful to have Christine Kupfer guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May they support and enrich your practice.

    This week’s theme is: Meditating on the Five Elements : A Journey into Interconnectedness

    This week, we explore how the classical elements – earth, water, fire, air and space – invite a meeting between our inner landscape and the living world. Each session offers a meditative gesture of presence, revealing that we are never separate: we are the breath, the body, and earth becoming aware of itself.

    Our Dharma Library thrives through collective generosity. Your donation helps sustain this offering for our entire community.

    Read More

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of July 18, 2022

    This week’s topic is Perfectly Imperfect. “True perfection seems imperfect, yet is perfectly itself.” – Lao Tzu. Expecting life to be perfect is stressful: a beautiful goal like “getting it right” prevents us from developing when it morphs into “never getting anything wrong.” The non-harming noble-truths path of the Dharma may arouse perfectionism, but if carefully followed, can set us free from such entrapment.

    Read More